Bearden Boutique Offers Suzani-Style Footwear, Bags
Bearden, TN – April Montgomery’s new Bearden boutique offers original boots, shoes and bags not readily available in much of the United States.Suzani Styles opened in Bearden in October, and many of the products it carries are designed by Zeynep Yurderi, who lives in New Jersey but grew up in Turkey. Yurderi’s designs are suzani style, a decorative tribal tapestry developed in Central Asia around the 18th century. Montgomery said the word suzani comes from the Persian word for needle. Originally, the suzani tapestries were used for wedding dowries, but over the centuries it has expanded to bags, footwear and blankets.
“From a very young age, I loved boots and shoes,” Yurderi said in a radio interview in September 2011. “Growing up in Turkey, I was always mesmerized by the level of detail in the designs of the ancient Ottoman Empire and the Central Asian arts. Now being able to share the designs that I have admired for so long by incorporating them into modern day fashions is a dream come true.”
The suzani tapestry Yurderi uses is hand-stitched from vibrantly colored silk by artisans in Uzbekistan, so every pair of boots or shoes and every bag that Montgomery sells is unique. To turn the tapestry into footwear, Montgomery said the fabric is cut and attached to leather, usually made from goat or sheep skin, which is later used to make a shoe.
